OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
HPTune: Hierarchical Proactive Tuning for Collision-Free Model Predictive Control
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2026
Year: 2026

Parameter tuning is a powerful approach to enhance adaptability in model predictive control (MPC) motion planners. However, existing methods typically operate in a myopic fashion that only evaluates executed actions, leading to inefficient parameter updates due to the sparsity of failure events (e.g., obstacle nearness or collision). To cope with this issue, we propose to extend evaluation from executed to non-executed actions, yielding a hierarchical proactive tuning (HPTune) framework that combines both a fast-level tuning and a slow-level tuning. The fast one adopts risk indicators of predictive closing speed and predictive proximity distance, and the slow one leverages an extended evaluation loss for closed-loop backpropagation. Additionally, we integrate HPTune with the Doppler LiDAR that provides obstacle velocities apart from position-only measurements for enhanced motion predictions, thus facilitating the implementation of HPTune. Extensive experiments on high-fidelity simulator demonstrate that HPTune achieves efficient MPC tuning and outperforms various baseline schemes in complex environments. It is found that HPTune enables situation-tailored motion planning by formulating a safe, agile collision avoidance strategy.
Memorization Control in Diffusion Models from Denoising-centric Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Controlling memorization in diffusion models is critical for applications that require generated data to closely match the training distribution. Existing approaches mainly focus on data centric or model centric modifications, treating the diffusion model as an isolated predictor. In this paper, we study memorization in diffusion models from a denoising centric perspective. We show that uniform timestep sampling leads to unequal learning contributions across denoising steps due to differences in signal to noise ratio, which biases training toward memorization. To address this, we propose a timestep sampling strategy that explicitly controls where learning occurs along the denoising trajectory. By adjusting the width of the confidence interval, our method provides direct control over the memorization generalization trade off. Experiments on image and 1D signal generation tasks demonstrate that shifting learning emphasis toward later denoising steps consistently reduces memorization and improves distributional alignment with training data, validating the generality and effectiveness of our approach.
BEAP-Agent: Backtrackable Execution and Adaptive Planning for GUI Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

GUI agents are designed to automate repetitive tasks and enhance productivity. However, existing GUI agents struggle to recover once they follow an incorrect exploration path, often leading to task failure. In this work, we model GUI task execution as a DFS process and propose BEAP-Agent, a DFS-based framework that supports long-range, multi-level state backtracking with dynamic task tracking and updating. The framework consists of three collaborative components: Planner, Executor, and Tracker. Together, they enable effective task exploration and execution. BEAP-Agent fills the gap in systematic backtracking mechanisms for GUI agents, offering a systematic solution for long-horizon task exploration. We conducted a systematic evaluation on the OSWorld benchmark, where BEAP-Agent achieved an accuracy of 28.2%, validating the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Expected Improvement via Gradient Norms
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Bayesian Optimization (BO) is a principled approach for optimizing expensive black-box functions, with Expected Improvement (EI) being one of the most widely used acquisition functions. Despite its empirical success, EI is known to be overly exploitative and can converge to suboptimal stationary points. We propose Expected Improvement via Gradient Norms (EI-GN), a novel acquisition function that applies the improvement principle to a gradient-aware auxiliary objective, thereby promoting sampling in regions that are both high-performing and approaching first-order stationarity. EI-GN relies on gradient observations used to learn gradient-enhanced surrogate models that enable principled gradient inference from function evaluations. We derive a tractable closed-form expression for EI-GN that allows efficient optimization and show that the proposed acquisition is consistent with the improvement-based acquisition framework. Empirical evaluations on standard BO benchmarks demonstrate that EI-GN yields consistent improvements against standard baselines. We further demonstrate applicability of EI-GN to control policy learning problems.
Small models, big threats: Characterizing safety challenges from low-compute AI models
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2026
Year: 2026

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are revolutionizing fields such as medicine, drug discovery, and materials science; however, many technologists and policymakers are also concerned about the technology's risks. To date, most concrete policies around AI governance have focused on managing AI risk by considering the amount of compute required to operate or build a given AI system. However, low-compute AI systems are becoming increasingly more performant - and more dangerous. Driven by agentic workflows, parameter quantization, and other model compression techniques, capabilities once only achievable on frontier-level systems have diffused into low-resource models deployable on consumer devices. In this report, we profile this trend by downloading historical benchmark performance data for over 5,000 large language models (LLMs) hosted on HuggingFace, noting the model size needed to achieve competitive LLM benchmarks has decreased by more than 10X over the past year. We then simulate the computational resources needed for an actor to launch a series of digital societal harm campaigns - such as disinformation botnets, sexual extortion schemes, voice-cloning fraud, and others - using low-compute open-source models and find nearly all studied campaigns can easily be executed on consumer-grade hardware. This position paper argues that protection measures for high-compute models leave serious security holes for their low-compute counterparts, meaning it is urgent both policymakers and technologists make greater efforts to understand and address this emerging class of threats.
Hebbian Learning with Global Direction
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

Backpropagation algorithm has driven the remarkable success of deep neural networks, but its lack of biological plausibility and high computational costs have motivated the ongoing search for alternative training methods. Hebbian learning has attracted considerable interest as a biologically plausible alternative to backpropagation. Nevertheless, its exclusive reliance on local information, without consideration of global task objectives, fundamentally limits its scalability. Inspired by the biological synergy between neuromodulators and local plasticity, we introduce a novel model-agnostic Global-guided Hebbian Learning (GHL) framework, which seamlessly integrates local and global information to scale up across diverse networks and tasks. In specific, the local component employs Oja's rule with competitive learning to ensure stable and effective local updates. Meanwhile, the global component introduces a sign-based signal that guides the direction of local Hebbian plasticity updates. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing Hebbian approaches. Notably, on large-scale network and complex datasets like ImageNet, our framework achieves the competitive results and significantly narrows the gap with standard backpropagation.
Rethinking Federated Graph Foundation Models: A Graph-Language Alignment-based Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Recent studies of federated graph foundational models (FedGFMs) break the idealized and untenable assumption of having centralized data storage to train graph foundation models, and accommodate the reality of distributed, privacy-restricted data silos. Despite their simplicity and intuition, existing studies that project aligned generalizable knowledge onto a discrete token space via vector-quantized backbones suffer from irreversible knowledge loss during the quantization process. In this context, we argue that reconciling the semantic-structural orthogonality and integrity between pre-trained language models (PLMs) and graph neural networks (GNNs) is paramount for developing effective FedGFMs while simultaneously mitigating the severe data heterogeneity and communication constraints inherent in distributed, resource-limited environments. To address these issues, we propose FedGALA (Federated Graph And Language Alignment), a framework that resolves graph-based semantic-structural orthogonality and integrity in federated settings by employing unsupervised contrastive learning to align GNNs and frozen PLMs within a continuous embedding space, thereby capturing robust, transferable general knowledge. Subsequently, FedGALA leverages a communication-efficient prompt tuning mechanism to steer these pre-aligned encoders and frozen PLMs, facilitating effective adaptation to diverse downstream tasks while circumventing the prohibitive overhead of full-parameter fine-tuning. The comprehensive experiments validate that FedGALA outperforms all competitive baselines across multi-domain datasets on multiple tasks with up to 14.37% performance improvement.
DA-SPS: A Dual-stage Network based on Singular Spectrum Analysis, Patching-strategy and Spearman-correlation for Multivariate Time-series Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Multivariate time-series forecasting, as a typical problem in the field of time series prediction, has a wide range of applications in weather forecasting, traffic flow prediction, and other scenarios. However, existing works do not effectively consider the impact of extraneous variables on the prediction of the target variable. On the other hand, they fail to fully extract complex sequence information based on various time patterns of the sequences. To address these drawbacks, we propose a DA-SPS model, which adopts different modules for feature extraction based on the information characteristics of different variables. DA-SPS mainly consists of two stages: the target variable processing stage (TVPS) and the extraneous variables processing stage (EVPS). In TVPS, the model first uses Singular Spectrum Analysis (SSA) to process the target variable sequence and then uses Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and P-Conv-LSTM which deploys a patching strategy to extract features from trend and seasonality components, respectively. In EVPS, the model filters extraneous variables that have a strong correlation with the target variate by using Spearman correlation analysis and further analyses them using the L-Attention module which consists of LSTM and attention mechanism. Finally, the results obtained by TVPS and EVPS are combined through weighted summation and linear mapping to produce the final prediction. The results on four public datasets demonstrate that the DA-SPS model outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, its performance in real-world scenarios is further validated using a private dataset collected by ourselves, which contains the test items' information on laptop motherboards.
User-Centric Evidence Ranking for Attribution and Fact Verification
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

Attribution and fact verification are critical challenges in natural language processing for assessing information reliability. While automated systems and Large Language Models (LLMs) aim to retrieve and select concise evidence to support or refute claims, they often present users with either insufficient or overly redundant information, leading to inefficient and error-prone verification. To address this, we propose Evidence Ranking, a novel task that prioritizes presenting sufficient information as early as possible in a ranked list. This minimizes user reading effort while still making all available evidence accessible for sequential verification. We compare two approaches for the new ranking task: one-shot ranking and incremental ranking. We introduce a new evaluation framework, inspired by information retrieval metrics, and construct a unified benchmark by aggregating existing fact verification datasets. Extensive experiments with diverse models show that incremental ranking strategies better capture complementary evidence and that LLM-based methods outperform shallower baselines, while still facing challenges in balancing sufficiency and redundancy. Compared to evidence selection, we conduct a controlled user study and demonstrate that evidence ranking both reduces reading effort and improves verification. This work provides a foundational step toward more interpretable, efficient, and user-aligned information verification systems.
DataCross: A Unified Benchmark and Agent Framework for Cross-Modal Heterogeneous Data Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

In real-world data science and enterprise decision-making, critical information is often fragmented across directly queryable structured sources (e.g., SQL, CSV) and "zombie data" locked in unstructured visual documents (e.g., scanned reports, invoice images). Existing data analytics agents are predominantly limited to processing structured data, failing to activate and correlate this high-value visual information, thus creating a significant gap with industrial needs. To bridge this gap, we introduce DataCross, a novel benchmark and collaborative agent framework for unified, insight-driven analysis across heterogeneous data modalities. DataCrossBench comprises 200 end-to-end analysis tasks across finance, healthcare, and other domains. It is constructed via a human-in-the-loop reverse-synthesis pipeline, ensuring realistic complexity, cross-source dependency, and verifiable ground truth. The benchmark categorizes tasks into three difficulty tiers to evaluate agents' capabilities in visual table extraction, cross-modal alignment, and multi-step joint reasoning. We also propose the DataCrossAgent framework, inspired by the "divide-and-conquer" workflow of human analysts. It employs specialized sub-agents, each an expert on a specific data source, which are coordinated via a structured workflow of Intra-source Deep Exploration, Key Source Identification, and Contextual Cross-pollination. A novel reReAct mechanism enables robust code generation and debugging for factual verification. Experimental results show that DataCrossAgent achieves a 29.7% improvement in factuality over GPT-4o and exhibits superior robustness on high-difficulty tasks, effectively activating fragmented "zombie data" for insightful, cross-modal analysis.
Generation Enhances Understanding in Unified Multimodal Models via Multi-Representation Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) integrate both visual understanding and generation within a single framework. Their ultimate aspiration is to create a cycle where understanding and generation mutually reinforce each other. While recent post-training methods have successfully leveraged understanding to enhance generation, the reverse direction of utilizing generation to improve understanding remains largely unexplored. In this work, we propose UniMRG (Unified Multi-Representation Generation), a simple yet effective architecture-agnostic post-training method. UniMRG enhances the understanding capabilities of UMMs by incorporating auxiliary generation tasks. Specifically, we train UMMs to generate multiple intrinsic representations of input images, namely pixel (reconstruction), depth (geometry), and segmentation (structure), alongside standard visual understanding objectives. By synthesizing these diverse representations, UMMs capture complementary information regarding appearance, spatial relations, and structural layout. Consequently, UMMs develop a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of visual inputs. Extensive experiments across diverse UMM architectures demonstrate that our method notably enhances fine-grained perception, reduces hallucinations, and improves spatial understanding, while simultaneously boosting generation capabilities.
Accurate Network Traffic Matrix Prediction via LEAD: a Large Language Model-Enhanced Adapter-Based Conditional Diffusion Model
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Driven by the evolution toward 6G and AI-native edge intelligence, network operations increasingly require predictive and risk-aware adaptation under stringent computation and latency constraints. Network Traffic Matrix (TM), which characterizes flow volumes between nodes, is a fundamental signal for proactive traffic engineering. However, accurate TM forecasting remains challenging due to the stochastic, non-linear, and bursty nature of network dynamics. Existing discriminative models often suffer from over-smoothing and provide limited uncertainty awareness, leading to poor fidelity under extreme bursts. To address these limitations, we propose LEAD, a Large Language Model (LLM)-Enhanced Adapter-based conditional Diffusion model. First, LEAD adopts a "Traffic-to-Image" paradigm to transform traffic matrices into RGB images, enabling global dependency modeling via vision backbones. Then, we design a "Frozen LLM with Trainable Adapter" model, which efficiently captures temporal semantics with limited computational cost. Moreover, we propose a Dual-Conditioning Strategy to precisely guide a diffusion model to generate complex, dynamic network traffic matrices. Experiments on the Abilene and GEANT datasets demonstrate that LEAD outperforms all baselines. On the Abilene dataset, LEAD attains a remarkable 45.2% reduction in RMSE against the best baseline, with the error margin rising only marginally from 0.1098 at one-step to 0.1134 at 20-step predictions. Meanwhile, on the GEANT dataset, LEAD achieves a 0.0258 RMSE at 20-step prediction horizon which is 27.3% lower than the best baseline.
Variance & Greediness: A comparative study of metric-learning losses
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Metric learning is central to retrieval, yet its effects on embedding geometry and optimization dynamics are not well understood. We introduce a diagnostic framework, VARIANCE (intra-/inter-class variance) and GREEDINESS (active ratio and gradient norms), to compare seven representative losses, i.e., Contrastive, Triplet, N-pair, InfoNCE, ArcFace, SCL, and CCL, across five image-retrieval datasets. Our analysis reveals that Triplet and SCL preserve higher within-class variance and clearer inter-class margins, leading to stronger top-1 retrieval in fine-grained settings. In contrast, Contrastive and InfoNCE compact embeddings are achieved quickly through many small updates, accelerating convergence but potentially oversimplifying class structures. N-pair achieves a large mean separation but with uneven spacing. These insights reveal a form of efficiency-granularity trade-off and provide practical guidance: prefer Triplet/SCL when diversity preservation and hard-sample discrimination are critical, and Contrastive/InfoNCE when faster embedding compaction is desired.
LION: A Clifford Neural Paradigm for Multimodal-Attributed Graph Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

Recently, the rapid advancement of multimodal domains has driven a data-centric paradigm shift in graph ML, transitioning from text-attributed to multimodal-attributed graphs. This advancement significantly enhances data representation and expands the scope of graph downstream tasks, such as modality-oriented tasks, thereby improving the practical utility of graph ML. Despite its promise, limitations exist in the current neural paradigms: (1) Neglect Context in Modality Alignment: Most existing methods adopt topology-constrained or modality-specific operators as tokenizers. These aligners inevitably neglect graph context and inhibit modality interaction, resulting in suboptimal alignment. (2) Lack of Adaptation in Modality Fusion: Most existing methods are simple adaptations for 2-modality graphs and fail to adequately exploit aligned tokens equipped with topology priors during fusion, leading to poor generalizability and performance degradation. To address the above issues, we propose LION (c\underline{LI}ff\underline{O}rd \underline{N}eural paradigm) based on the Clifford algebra and decoupled graph neural paradigm (i.e., propagation-then-aggregation) to implement alignment-then-fusion in multimodal-attributed graphs. Specifically, we first construct a modality-aware geometric manifold grounded in Clifford algebra. This geometric-induced high-order graph propagation efficiently achieves modality interaction, facilitating modality alignment. Then, based on the geometric grade properties of aligned tokens, we propose adaptive holographic aggregation. This module integrates the energy and scale of geometric grades with learnable parameters to improve modality fusion. Extensive experiments on 9 datasets demonstrate that LION significantly outperforms SOTA baselines across 3 graph and 3 modality downstream tasks.
Conversation for Non-verifiable Learning: Self-Evolving LLMs through Meta-Evaluation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

Training large language models (LLMs) for non-verifiable tasks, such as creative writing, dialogue, and ethical reasoning, remains challenging due to the absence of ground-truth labels. While LLM-as-Judge approaches offer a scalable alternative to human feedback, they face a fundamental limitation: performance is constrained by the evaluator's own quality. If the judge cannot recognize good solutions, it cannot provide useful training signals, and evaluation biases (e.g., favoring verbosity over quality) remain unaddressed. This motivates meta-evaluation: the ability to evaluate and improve the evaluator itself. We introduce CoNL, a framework that unifies generation, evaluation, and meta-evaluation through multi-agent self-play. Our key insight: critique quality can be measured by whether it helps others improve their solutions. In CoNL, multiple agents sharing the same policy engage in structured conversations to propose, critique, and revise solutions. Critiques that enable solution improvements earn a diagnostic reward, creating explicit supervision for meta-evaluation and enabling joint optimization of generation and judging capabilities through self-play, without external judges or ground truth. Experiments on five benchmarks show that CoNL achieves consistent improvements over self-rewarding baselines while maintaining stable training.
A block-coordinate descent framework for non-convex composite optimization. Application to sparse precision matrix estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Block-coordinate descent (BCD) is the method of choice to solve numerous large scale optimization problems, however their theoretical study for non-convex optimization, has received less attention. In this paper, we present a new block-coordinate descent (BCD) framework to tackle non-convex composite optimization problems, ensuring decrease of the objective function and convergence to a solution. This framework is general enough to include variable metric proximal gradient updates, proximal Newton updates, and alternated minimization updates. This generality allows to encompass three versions of the most used solvers in the sparse precision matrix estimation problem, deemed Graphical Lasso: graphical ISTA, Primal GLasso, and QUIC. We demonstrate the value of this new framework on non-convex sparse precision matrix estimation problems, providing convergence guarantees and up to a $100$-fold reduction in the number of iterations required to reach state-of-the-art estimation quality.